Response: SEO is Dead

A good friend and co-worker shot me an article the other day that ruffled my feathers, but in a good way. The article featured on Marketing Tech Blog, simply titled “SEO is Dead,” was an odd read to say the least. In my open-minded opinion, a lot of the article was juxtaposed, supplying lines like “Traditional SEO is no longer a viable solution for businesses to invest in.” I’m not too sure what “traditional SEO” encompasses. I suppose Douglas Karr is trying to shine the already shone light on “unestablished SEO.”

Here are the two main things that bother me about this article:

• The generalization that SEO is dead.
• The generalization that increased backlinks is frowned upon by Google.

You see, Doug, any white hat SEO consultant who is currently practicing knows what you’re preaching as “unestablished SEO.” You’re not a pioneer to this concept, and every great digital strategist knows that humans buy products and services, not robots. His second sentence of the article says, “The old math of increased backlinks...is now a target for Google to identify your site and bury it in search results.” So, are we suppose to avoid getting quality and relevant links to sites? And wait, Google will penalize us for this? 

He goes on to say, “A true, new SEO package incorporates conversion analysis...making it easy for readers to share that content, employing public relations connections to find opportunities to share that content, and promoting the heck out of that content.” Whoa whoa whoa. Doesn’t online public relations and shared content eventually lead to increased backlinks? I thought we were suppose to avoid this? I suggest being more specific as to what kind of backlinks you are referring to.

The article ends with a presentation that starts with a slide promoting his new book for dummies about corporate blogging. Why blog if SEO is dead? Also, why give an article a title that’s just going to kill the value of what you’re writing? His fourth slide is about evolving the world of search. If search is evolving, then shouldn’t that tell you SEO is thriving? His eighth slide is about call-to-actions and landing pages. These two subjects have a lot to do with SEO and search marketing, specifically on-page SEO that is often referred to as SEO; therefore, justifying the fact that SEO is not dead. 

Lastly, I want to say that much of what this guy talks about is what I preach. Yeah, sure you have to optimize for robots, but robots don't buy shit. Enter the human. He talks a lot about optimizing for the human which I completely agree with. Unfortunately, optimizing for humans (website optimization) is included in the realm of SEO. Google understands all of this. SEO is not dead. Digital marketing is far from dead. I believe Doug is a very smart and successful man. He just missed specifics that are EXTREMELY important to people who are trying to learn.